"the pungent oranges and bright, green wings
seem things in some procession of the dead,
winding across wide water, without sound."
"does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs
hang always heavy in that perfect sky..."*
I long to live in a grove of orange trees heavy with ripe fruit and clamourous with the shrill chirping of cockatiels even on chilly winter days...
we wander into an immaculate courtyard of a convent converted to art school crowded with lush green boughs sweetly pixellated with orange dots...
and in a garden high above the city, a lemon tree harbours delusions of mediterranean warmth yielding to its teeming need to fruit abundantly...
but not this cat which hunts in conspicuous non-camouflage amongst a cultivated and well-tended palm garden below the modest casas staggering down a steep slope...
at Gaudi's rock-and-rolling Parc Guell, century plants erupt in dangerous sword clumps to fend off invaders until they flower just once many years on after which they promptly shrivel up due to such laborious reproductory exertion...
a cool century later, in a stainless steel park below the smooth cucumber-shaped Torre Agbar, designer cacti are arranged meticulously in stacked metal pots and on top of posts contorting our expectations of landscape design and the urban-nature spatial experience...
around the corner from where we were staying, a private babylon drapes luxuriantly off a tiny balconey - a natural green-screen to the visual - and airy - pollution of living in micro-medieval quarters...
"what is divinity if it can come
only in silent shadows and in dreams?
shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
in pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
in any balm or beauty of the earth,
things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?"*
[*selected lines from Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning",1915/1923]
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